


wait for it, wait

by kleinergruenerkaktus



Series: What is the meaning of this? [2]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: First Kiss, Friggin' Fluff, M/M, god help me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-26
Updated: 2016-01-26
Packaged: 2018-05-16 10:26:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5824957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kleinergruenerkaktus/pseuds/kleinergruenerkaktus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They skipped a couple steps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wait for it, wait

**Author's Note:**

> Picks up straight after 'when you've got skin in the game'.
> 
> 27/1/2016: made some minor edits, most notably an extra paragraph near the beginning.

Holster’s alarm goes off at seven. It’s the Final Fantasy chocobo theme as sung by three-sheets-to-the-wind Ransom, which is great because a) it never stops being funny, and b) Ransom hates it. Holster enjoys the contrast between Ransom’s joyful sing-shouting blaring tinnily from his phone, and real Ransom’s aggrieved groaning above him. It’s a good way to start the day.

This morning, he goes from muzzily thinking _unf what fuck no more sleep_ , to hearing Ransom’s voice crack on the high note and smiling through his bleary annoyance, to thinking _Ransom_ and suddenly being all the way awake.

_Holy hell._

He rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling, eyes wide and unfocused. In his dark, quiet bedroom (Bruins posters on the walls, dusty trophies on the dresser, crappy Dell on the desk amid piles of his parents’ administration), what happened between them mere hours ago feels like something Holster made up, one of his many pervy fantasies about his best friend. But when he checks his call history the evidence is irrefutable: Ransom called him, at 03:41, for 38 minutes. Holster really did hear him come, on a toy that Holster picked out for him, following the rules that Holster set for him, waiting until Holster told him to. 

Did that call get recorded somewhere? he wonders, then flinches a little. God, he’s such a creep. If Ransom had any idea of what goes down in the Red Light District of Holster’s brain, he’d be running for the hills.

Though - Ransom has _some_ idea, now, and he seems to be running in the opposite direction. _He_ called Holster, which he didn’t have to do. Holster reaches into his boxers at the memory of Rans’ voice, low and a little hoarse, turned on and amused and affectionate and slightly hesitant with the novelty of it, all these things that Holster can hear like chords in a song that he’s heard a million times. And then the new things, things that Holster needs to hear more of asap: the way he keens when he’s holding off orgasm, the way his voice rises, the way he keeps holding his breath and then releasing it like he’s been punched in the midriff.

The thing is - _oh, there_ \- the thing is that Ransom evaded him. Holster’s original plan, when he hadn’t been sure how much he could push, had been to let Ransom control the time and place. But during that Christmas Eve phone call, when Ransom discovered just how far Holster’d gone with this and _still_ invited him further, he’d grown reckless. Restricted Ransom to a day when he was very unlikely to have more than a minute to himself, and spend most of it in a car with Holster. He hadn’t thought it through, it was wildly impractical, but - Ransom and his _rules_ , it was too good not to fuck with. He’d try to be cool, but it would actually stress the hell out of him. In a good way, though, the way he gets when Holster’s in charge and he doesn’t know what’s going to happen, but he’s gonna let it. Holster pictures it: Ransom in the passenger seat, squirming as it gets dark and his time’s running out. Holster teasing him, touching him, telling him to sit on his hands and be patient. Holster turning onto a parking lot somewhere, finding a deserted corner. Ransom stretched out on the backseat, twisting, begging -

“Goddamn,” Holster says out loud, when his body is done twitching.

-

He’s glad Ransom didn’t give him the chance to push it that far, he thinks later when he’s ironing his shirt (Izzy’s chirps about it suddenly uncomfortably on point). It would’ve been too much. After two and a half years of being practically joined at the hip, Holster thinks he’s got good instincts for how Ransom’s going to react to basically anything, from the zombie apocalypse (scorched earth policy - this is at least half the reason why Ransom knows every incendiary combination of chemicals off by heart) to pregnancy scares (best April Fool’s prank _ever_ , totally worth the split lip), but this is. Delicate work. One wrong move could destroy more than their friendship.

He shrugs on the shirt, and yeah, it’s his ‘date shirt’, whatever. It brings out his eyes like whoa. Every little helps.

-

“Give our love to Justin, alright? And his family.” His mom tells him when he’s thrown his duffel in the back and has no more reason to stall. She’s wearing a coat over her bathrobe and fuzzy slippers; the girls haven’t come out, because after two weeks of sharing a bathroom they’re no longer sentimental enough to brave the cold for him. His dad gives him a brief, but tight hug and tells him to drive safe and not get distracted, which, um.

“I’m sorry I’ve been kind of…” he vaguely waves his hand. _Preoccupied with long-distance-topping my best friend_ is not a sentence he feels any need to say out loud. His parents, fortunately, seem to understand.

“Just bring her over here when you’ve clinched her, yeah?” says his dad with an actual wink, and his mom is giving him this knowing smile, and Holster reverses out of the driveway with more speed than is strictly advisable, before he can say something stupid like _I already have_.

-

He’s turning onto the interstate and trying to think of a cool, funny, bro-y but caring opening line - something that says _I acknowledge what happened last night and want to affirm that the state of our union is strong_ , but slightly more chill than that - when he realizes that they haven’t even fucking kissed yet.

Everyone thinks they have. It’s like, everyone does that at some point, right? Especially at Samwell, where drunken sexual exploration is practically a frog rite of passage. With the way they’re otherwise all over each other, people copypaste them into false memories of spin the bottle, gay chicken, locker-room shenanigans. Whatever. Plenty of that in Juniors. Holster was so over it, eventually: the aggressive ironic homo-eroticism, the never-ending list of things that were ‘gay’ - including thoughtful conversation and treating women with respect - and the fact that of the hundreds of players, managers, coaches, trainers, and handlers that he met in those two years, exactly zero of them were out. It was like fucking Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

Anyway, the point is, Holster is not on board with that shit. Kissing a guy for laughs, or even just to see what it’s like - he only needed to try that once to know that it was more than just curiosity. Kissing his best friend, sloppy, casual, playing it off as a joke right after - he has more self-respect than that. Or worse, kissing him and risk it making things weird. No, they haven’t kissed.

Now, though.

He thinks about it all the way to Toronto.

-

Ransom, when he opens the door, is wearing a light-blue button-down and a dark-blue knitted cardigan that is new and on the nice side of preppy, and his face is as easy to read as it always is: _happy keyed-up sleep-deprived slightly nervous_ , like tags in a sans serif font at his mouth and the corners of his eyes.

Ransom’s dad is wearing a dark grey blazer over a red sweater, he looks like 50-year old Ransom but with a much rounder face, and he is right behind Ransom, like _right_ behind him. Holster’s plan - to say “tell them it’s carol singers!” and then swoop in - is foiled.

“Tadaa!” he shouts instead, because the show must go on, and Ransom goes “Bro, you made it!”, and at least they can hug, a few pascals tighter and a few milliseconds longer than maybe they usually would, and Holster can breathe in and smell his stupidly expensive cologne before stepping back and doing the whole handshake, “Thank you for having me Mr. Oluransi” thing.

“Good to see you, Adam,” Ransom’s dad says mildly. Holster’s dad told Ransom to just call him Dave right off the bat, but Mr. Oluransi never did. Something about him always makes Holster feel like a dubious son-in-law, and the whole _I lured your child into my kinky sex games_ thing that’s on loop in his head throughout the exchange certainly isn’t helping. “How is school?”

“Dad, do we have to?” groans Ransom, as Holster strings together something about _not too bad_ and _still enrolled, so_ , and he’s tugging Holster towards the stairs by the elbow when Mrs. Oluransi comes out of the kitchen and exclaims: “Holster!”

Not hard to see where Ransom got his party genes from. Mrs. Oluransi’s delight in calling him Holster, in spite or indeed because of its bizarre awkwardness, is one of the reasons why he and Mama Ransom get on so well (that, and their shared love for Designing Women). And normally Holster would love to catch up and get some gory surgery stories to enjoy over lunch, but as they hug and he is herded towards the living room with the cheerfully ominous promise that he’s going to meet _everyone_ , Ransom trailing helplessly in his wake, all he can think about is getting Ransom alone somewhere for just five goddamn minutes.

There must be a trickster god laughing his ass off somewhere, because they can’t make it happen. The house is bursting at the seams with people, milling around like ants carrying plates of - yes, genuinely delicious food, let it not be said that Holster isn’t appreciative of that - but far from that lending him anonymity, it actually makes him into a bigger target. Ransom’s family is way too friendly, way too polite, and have seen way too much of each other recently; he is fresh meat. 

“If I have to talk about my major or my future plans one more time,” he hisses at Ransom out of the corner of his mouth; Ransom laughs around the suya he’s stripping off the skewer with neat, careful teeth, looking at him the way Holster can’t stop looking at Ransom, full of anticipation of he’s not sure what, but he _wants_ it, so much that it costs effort to look away and smile when someone he is almost positive is Ransom’s paternal great-uncle shuffles up to him and launches into reminiscence of his glory days playing hockey in the CAF.

They’ve nearly managed to edge out of the living room when someone breaks into Auld Lange Syne, and everyone has to join in. They make it to the kitchen and, for one hopeful second, think they’re alone when Rory comes in to snag a cookie, and harangues Holster until he agrees to hear her play the Moonlight Sonata in the study. The study, after some patience, is theirs, and Holster wastes precious time fingering out a half-remembered melody with one hand, and then Ransom moves towards him like he doesn’t know whether to speed up or slow down, eyes wide and mouth opening to say something, when one of the _twenty-thousand_ aunties currently on the premises bursts in clutching a breast pump and a screaming toddler.

“Wanna get out of here?” asks Ransom when they’ve escaped to the patio, overlooking the rather sad, frozen back yard. Holster nods.

“Yeah, if you’re planning to make it to Boston before midnight, you’d probably better,” a cousin sagely opines, before taking a long drag of his cigarette and tapping the ashes into a sickly lavender bush.

-

“You’re leaving? Already?”

“It’s a long drive, Rory, sorry. Holts, can you help me get my -“

“I’LL DO IT!”

-

“Drive safely, eh?” Mr. Oluransi tells them before shutting the door on Holster’s side, which a) is unexpectedly sweet, and b) why do people keep telling him that? He’s a great driver!

“‘Course, dad,” says Ransom, leaning over slightly from the passenger seat. “Love you.”

Crinkles fan out from Mr. Oluransi’s eyes when he smiles. “Love you, Justin.”

They trundle out of the cul-de-sac amid a chorus of _bye!_ s and much grandiose waving, Holster slamming on the horn a few times for dramatic effect, and then they’re turning the corner and Casa Oluransi disappears from view.

“So,” says Holster, with equal parts relief and tension and need to get this out of the way _now_ , but Ransom cuts him off with a terse, “Wait. Left here, then first exit on the roundabout.”

“Computer says no,” Holster mutters, eyeing the GPS, but he obeys. 

They drive in silence for a few minutes, interrupted only by Ransom saying “Right - no, next one. Left at the end of the road.” A large, windowless building looms up ahead, painted a joyless sort of grey-white, with a grimy plexiglass roof and a huge empty parking lot. Holster doesn’t need to be told to turn onto it, his body recognizing the place before Ransom says, “This is where I learned to skate.”

Holster parks with one rough tug on the wheel, across three spaces. The sudden silence as the engine switches off feels charged. “Looks a bit -“

“Yeah.” Ransom chuckles nervously, runs a hand over his head. “But I fucking loved it, so it was -“

“Yeah.”

Silence. They stare out across the parking lot, at the squat, ugly rink presiding over it, the same as the other thousands of ugly ice rinks across Canada and the northern U.S., but unique in all the unimportant ways, the exact color of the filthy carpet in the canteen, the graffiti in the bathroom stalls, the photos on the wall. There’s a logo painted over the entrance. Holster squints.

“Dude, is that an otter?”

“Holts,” says Ransom, twisting to face him, unclipping his seat belt.

He reaches up to take off Holster’s glasses, careful, pinching the legs between thumb and forefinger and tilting them up before tugging. They end up folded on the dashboard. Ransom’s blurry now, but close enough that Holster can see everything, his eyes, large and dark and sure.

The first brush of their lips is agonizingly soft. Not teasing, not hesitant, just restrained by an aching desire to do this right. Holster cups his hand around Ransom’s neck, slides it up to cradle his head; with his eyes closed and his focus completely on where Ransom’s breath touches his face, his left hand drifts until it finds an arm to hold. Ransom clutches at his jacket.

The second is a bit more puckered; it makes a small smacking sound. Their lips are chapped, skin a little rough with incoming stubble. Their shallow breathing is loud in the car. Holster pulls at Ransom’s head a little, to angle him a little different, so that he can -

 _God,_ that sound, the same sound he heard last night: impossibly quiet, just a breath getting stuck in Ransom’s throat. Their mouths open against each other, hungry, inquisitive, tongues darting, licking, teeth tugging, _slowly, gently_ , how are they only doing this now, why did they wait so damn long, Holster already can’t remember a time when he wasn’t doing this, when he didn’t _want_ to be doing this. Ransom’s body, the smell, the taste and the feel of him, are so familiar that each kiss feels like _hello, welcome back_.

The kiss ends when Holster tries to move closer and is held back by his seat belt, huffing in frustration, Ransom laughing shakily. They lean their foreheads against each other, holding as tight as they can with that stupid gear stick between them, smiling like idiots.

“My back’s starting to hurt,” says Ransom after a while, apologetically.

“We should probably get going,” Holster agrees, with a regretful glance at his watch. They’re both hard, and he thinks longingly of his plan to ravish Ransom in the back seat, but. “You can’t…right?”

“Nope.” Ransom’s face does something complicated as he says it. Holster can see that he wants it, but he wants to hold off just as much. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever understand these little fights he wages with himself, or what exactly he gets out of it, but he wants to try. He wants to be part of it.

“Okay,” he says simply. Ransom leans back in and kisses him, long and slow.

“We gotta go,” he declares when he disengages. “Get out, I’m driving.”

“The hell you are, it’s my car!”

“We’re going to have to switch eventually, and I grew up here, so it makes literally no sense if you drive.”

“Okay, but I get control of the music.”

“You get control of a lot of things,” mutters Ransom with faux-resentment as he adjusts the driver’s seat, and Holster laughs.

**Author's Note:**

> Gonna keep this going because chill. I have none.  
> IF THIS IS WRONG I DON'T WANNA BE RIGHT


End file.
